How to Create Voice Memos on Your iPhone or iPadGetting Recordings Started

How to Create Voice Memos on Your iPhone or iPad

If you want to record a conversation, speech, or note, you can do it with Apple's Voice Memos app on

Lance Whitney

Oct. 26, 2018, 3:10 a.m.

Apple's iOS 12 release introduced a lot of new features. While most attention has been on the new Memoji feature, the improved Apple Books, and the Screen Time app, the improved Voice Memos app is also impressive. You’ve long been able to create voice memos on your iPhone to record conversations, dictations, and other audio notes. Now with iOS 12, you can do the same thing on your iPad.

The app seems simple enough to use; just tap on the record button, right? However, there’s more to it than that. You can name and save your recordings, edit an audio file, share it via email, or send it to an online service. Let's take a tour of the app.

Getting Recordings Started

To record a memo on your iPad, make sure you're running iOS 12 or higher. Open the Voice Memos app. The first time you launch it, a welcome screen greets you with descriptions of the latest enhancements courtesy of iOS 12.

Start a New Recording

At the Voice Memos screen, tap the record button to start the recording.

Recording Audio Levels

The recording kicks off with a graph showing the audio levels. When you're done, tap the pause button. You can then resume the recording. Otherwise, tap the play button if you wish to hear the audio.

Save a Recording

To save the audio recording, tap the Done button.

Listen to a New Recording

The recording is saved as a voice memo. From here, you can play and pause the recording as well as skip ahead or go back 15 seconds.

Name a Recording

If you want to keep the recording, give it a name. Tap the default title of New Recording and rename it. If you don't want to keep the recording, tap the trash can icon to delete it.

Restore Deleted Recording

What if you change your mind and want it back? No problem. Tap on the entry for Recently Deleted and tap the recording. Tap on Recover and then Recover Recording. Don't wait too long, though. By default, any deleted recordings are purged after 30 days.

Edit a Recording

Maybe you want to keep the recording but would like to edit parts of it. Tap on the Edit link.

Replace Parts of a Recording

You can replace parts of the recording with new content. Move the scrubber to the area of the recording that you'd like to replace. Tap on the Replace button and record the new audio portion.

Finalize Replacement Audio

When you have recorded your new audio, remember to tap pause to stop the recorder. Otherwise, it might record over parts that you want to keep. You can then move the scrubber back to the start of the section you replaced and press play to hear the new audio.

Edit Audio Recording

Instead of adding new pieces of audio, you might just want to remove portions. Tap the crop icon in the upper right corner of the screen to trim any portions you want to delete.

Trim or Delete Audio Recording

You now have two options. Trim removes the sections of the audio before the left yellow marker and after the right yellow marker. Delete removes all the audio within the two yellow markers. Position the two markers accordingly and then tap either Trim or Delete, depending on what you want to remove.

Finalize Audio Edits

Play the audio to make sure you removed the right section. If not, just tap Cancel on the upper left corner and try again. If you're happy with your changes, tap the Save button and then tap Done.

Sharing and Saving Recordings

Once you have finalized the recording, you can share it or save it online. Tapping the Share icon lets you send it via email or messaging, or copy it to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, or another storage site.

Change Voice Memos Settings

You can also tweak your voice memo settings. Open Settings > Voice Memos. Tap on the setting for Clear Deleted if you want to change how long deleted files will be available to restore within the Voice Memos app. You can choose to delete your files immediately, after one day, seven days, or never. If you do nothing, the default is 30 days.

Tap on Audio Quality to tweak those settings. Keeping it as Compressed uses a lower audio quality but a smaller file size. Changing it to Lossless beefs up the quality but bumps up the size of each recording.

You can also turn off location-based naming if you don't want the location to be attached to your recordings.

Recording Across Devices

Finally, your voice memos are synced through iCloud, so any recordings you make on one of your iOS devices will pop up on others where your account is enabled.

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About the Author

Surviving a long and varied career in publishing, advertising, and IT, Lance Whitney now wears a few different technology hats. By day, he's a journalist, software trainer, and sometime Web developer. By night, he's asleep. These days, he writes news stories, columns, and reviews for CNET and other technology sites and publications. He;s written two books for Wiley & Sons: Windows 8 Five Minutes at a Time in 2012, and Teach Yourself VISUALLY LinkedIn in 2014. Contact Lance via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. See Full Bio